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EngageDigital

January 10, 2008

The Mainland Hostages

"I'd say, stay on the mainland; the idea of clustering and the magic spell of working with your neighbors is just a great appeal." Philip Linden

The Lindens need a paradigm shift in their thinking on the Mainland. They may be on their way there -- Blue Linden was heard to say something in an office hour about the Governor Linden HiveMind thinking about ways to "add value" to the mainland. No...HiveMind needs to think of ways to stop subtracting value, and adding must be left to those who will add it if they are not blocked by blight and menace like ad-farming.

But that's not even the paradigm shift I mean. They need to begin to think of the Mainland as a giant estate, like Anshe's Dreamland. They are an estate owner, with tenants. We've had the title "Gov Linden's Tenant" in the group Mainlanders for a long time. If they begin to see that they will open source this thing, and then really REALLY be competing with Anshe or Adam or whoever makes stand-alone sims and grids, they will realize the time is *now* to start enforcing the TOS and fixing chronic customer service problems like the chronic billing snafu causing account freezes for no good reason on perfectly good credit/debit cards.

And this is big. They need to let go the most sacred of their beliefs, the doctrine of fuck-you hedonism, as I call it, the doctrine of "I can do what-the-fuck I want on my land, so fuck you." But...they don't really need to let it go. They can keep it -- I know they are terribly wedded to it, ever since the day the cowboys like James or Cory blasted land away with bombs to terraform it, and ran around in big chicken avatars making dominos fall over and sims crash. No, they don't have to change but...

They need a paradigm shift. And here it is: they have to realize *they have already granted this right to 75 percent of the grid, and now it's time to zone the 25 percent that remains, which is partially zoned anyway on their own Governor Linden land*, in order to free people to enjoy their land to the fullest.

See what I mean? Very simple.

Yes. The mainland is only 20-25 percent of the grid now. Given all the water sims, the Governor Linden land, even the 16 abandonded sims' worth that Robin says they are whittling away and have down to 10 now -- it's probably more like 15-17 percent. It is shrinking daily, proportion-wise, as the islands sell.

With lag, clubs, griefing, ad-farms, extortion, stupid builds, idiocy on the mainland in some areas, people fled to the islands. They got to do what-the-fuck-they-wanted.

So let's pause and reflect on this now, please. 75 percent of the grid pays *more tier*, and many of them even paid more than the $1000-a-sim mainland auctions for $1250 or $1695 islands, and they do this so they can do *what the fuck they want*.

Let me say this again so you can really burn it is, especially my Linden friends: 75 percent of the grid is doing what-the-fuck-they-want on private islands. 15 percent of the grid is an area where less than 1 percent are doing what-the-fuck-they-want, and some 14 percent are held utter, bitter, hopeless, helpless hostages -- able to be freed only by joining the 75 percent.

People have gotten so used to thinking of islands as "zoned" or as "sanitized" or as "flat uninteresting white beaches like pancakes" that they forget that...that's what people want. Yeah. They are doing WTF they want when they do that, and even paying higher tier at times.

Oh, to be sure, only the owner of the whole island gets to do that. The tenants have to go by the land baron rules or covenants. But, hey, they have an AWFUL LOT of choice. I mean, there are 11,000 islands, of which, oh, let's say perhaps 2,000 are corporate (the corporations in SL don't tend to have big island portfolios. They might have 8 or 10. Heck, I have more sims than IBM does probably, that's how it works.)

So that means that say, 8-10,000 sims are out there, some of them owned by individuals or stores but a total boatload of them with every conceivable theme known to simkind. You can find sims with neon green soil. Red soil like Mars. Spooky Pet Cemetary sims. Dune sims (I have one of those, very rare, Anshe's a wonderful terraformer). The IHOP types of course. But there are plenty of geeks who have put together islands to given their little script-kiddy pals places to be "creative" and be able to do "WTF" they want.

Anshe has an area called Anarchy or Anarchia or something where you can buy land cheap and do WTF you want. I get a private chuckle every time I see some hapless chump trying to sell his Anarchy parcel. Guess anarchy isn't as fun when it's in your view ROFL.

The tiny, tiny, tiny -- did I say tiny, tiny? -- percentage of people who want to build big spinning purple towers with chickens on top, or giant refrigerators containing Gorean medicines and medical equipment, or goofy tree houses that don't look so hot -- they all do this, as much as they want, on these geeky sims. Lots of geeks fled to the islands, too.

In fact, of the people who scream the loudest on the forums that the abstract licentious fuck-you hedonist Creed of Second Life must be allowed to pervade everywhere, most of them don't actually own land. They sort of perch at friends. Or they rented. Or actually they've sold. They're tired of tier. Whatever.

So....as I said, what that leaves, are us hostages. Some of us, by dint of incredibly hard labour and persistence back in the days when whole sims were a rarity on the auction, have put together whole sims with zoning, i.e. rules that people agree to voluntarily. Maybe even 4 in a corner or in a row, such that the view isn't despoiled as far as draw distance can stretch. So there are whole swathes of niceness. There was a generation of land barons -- their ranks don't seem to be growing, but thinning -- who were buying these whole sims and laying out rentals, even laying out streets they held at their own expense to create nice communities. You can fly around the Russian provinces and see them -- there hundreds of landlords running little companies, my size or a bit smaller, or a bit bigger (I may still be the largest in terms of groups and parcels, but I think there are probably barons who own more sims now who offer larger parcels i.e. half a sim to customers).

It's not true, as Robin strangely said the other day, that the mainland is filled with "little communities" (Boardman, Taber, Slate, or even Ravenglass) or "casual users". No. It's filled with *businesses*. Businesses that own more sims than IBM or Cisco. That care for the customers that Lindens won't care for, directly, helping people orient and get their sea legs in SL. There are thousands of these customers -- probably a very good chunk of the log-ins. (I'd love for the Lindens to tell us what percentage of log-ons are in islands, and what are on mainland.)

Yet this bustling activity, this hard work, this really less-lucrative sort of sweat-equity (everyone knows the real money is in pancake island rentals) is terribly abused by ad farmers and club thieves.

Club thieves who steal the FPS off a sim and all its available avatar slots on smaller parcels have waned as a problem since gambling was banned because clubs began to roll up their operations with the ban and sell off their land. Those that remain in business with camping aren't getting the huge crowds they used to get with slots. There are some illegal operations that remain, but it's been cleaned up by and large. So we don't hear about this particular issue as much -- although camping remains as a bane for many.

Ad farms -- I don't need to tell you about. Read my JIRA proposals. (It's so laggy going there now I can't be bothered with links but if you can get logged on, just type "ad farms" into the search box and get the Meta Issue and look up all the proposals.)

The problem is that we can huff and puff on this great set of proposals from me and other hapless mainland hostages, but the Lindens are hobbled.

They're hobbled by the WTF doctrine -- which I'm trying to methadone-maintenance them off of, by telling them they have their WTF doctrinal fix with private islands where all their script kiddies in fact are doing what they want, along with all their original prim divas. BTW, there's sandboxes, too, where people do WTF they want and wind up on the police blotter.

But they're also hobbled by the fear of administration, which is of course damned silly. These are Lindens who can come out on a rainy night to Big Mushamush or all those other weird sims with names like Lockjaw and Ptomaine, and bestir themselves to hover over you and admonish you to move your waving tree that is waving on to an ad-farmers' land who has abuse reported you. (!). That was what made the Arbour Project guy quit Second Life. It nearly got Random Unsung expelled by Kenny Linden back that time.

So if they can do *that* sort of Mickey-Mouse waste of time following the rules of encroachment, which we can't deny are valid, and not come up with "tools" to end this "automagically," then they can...do the same about administering to enforcement of Community Standards No. 6 against transmission of unwanted advertising content -- spam, disturbing the peace, and interfering with the enjoyment of someone's SL. In fact, to do all 3 of those things to someone with ad farms is really egregious, and the Lindens need to worry more about the undermining of the rule of law by allowing No. 6 to go unenforced, rather than fretting about what it means not to enforce encroachment by letting outraged and helpless land owners put trees up to sort of block out the ugly sign view.

Ad farms are ruining immersion, blighting landscape and horribly reducing property values everywhere. At this point, with this big a Tragedy of the Commons, the Lindens surely realize that a) premiums don't sell for this, among other reasons b) people are reluctant to buy a whole sim or even a parcel because their purchase will be ruined by ad farms breaking out anywhere.

This has got to sink into HiveMind, if nothing else does.

Unfortunately, the Fear of Administration (something they fear because they just don't know how to manage the propagandizing of the police blotter correctly, and don't know how to inspire community dissemination of norms and peer pressure in a good way, instead of in the police-state informant way they do by default) -- this is keeping them from simply declaring ad-farms in violation of no. 6 like they...oh...declared banks illegal in violation of...something (they never did say) or ageplay depiction in violation of broadly offensive...you know, stuff like that. They do it all the time!

There are several dozen really, really bad ad farmers, people with the impudent and evil spirit of the Bush Guy, snotty assholes who taunt you as they cut up land right in your face in the water. Robo Marx. Umnik. Alex Potato. Chrischun Fassbinder. Ancient Shriner -- who thinks because he doesn't cut up land that his ugly spinning towers with his ads on them are ok to devalue our property with.

The Lindens need to take aim squarely at them, and declare them in violation of the TOS, as they realize they are harming the right of everybody else in the 15 percent of the land mass to do what the fuck THEY want. And they want the fuck what everybody wants on the islands -- peace, prosperity, a good view, nice builds, and so on.

Oh, you can't agree on what a nice build is? You're going to listen to the shrill harpies on the forums and groups who can't bear the idea that anyone will control their default fuck-you hedonism? Well, the hedonists already do what-they-want on 75 percent of the land mass of Second Life.

It's time to listen to where the mass of customers have gone -- they've gone to do WTF they want, paying more money. Those who remain to do this on the mainland are often interfering with the WTF rights of everybody else on the mainland.

You have to start with ad-farms, and figuring out what to do about Governor Linden land ban lists (a separate and thorny topic).

From there -- and already 150 percent improved mainland! -- you can -- or you don't have to -- consider where other simple rules like "no builds smack at the property line" can pertain.

What's not acceptable is mute-content, or "hide select" or whatever fancy term Daniel Linden used at Stanford. Render something something? Bottom line, this is Stalin erasing history. It's not a shared world. And it may create an arms race. I haven't dealt with the impudent evil spirit of an ad farmer feeling impunity by erasing him. I've freedom him to take that spirit to another venue in an arms race.

Ultimately, the Lindens must sit in Hive Mind and contemplate this: 75 percent of the grid is filled with people doing WTF they want on their land. On the remaining 25 percent, 2-5 percent is the Lindens doing WTF they want on their land. Another 1 percent at best, I imagine, is filled with griefers, extortionists, ad-cutters doing WTF *they want*.

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Comments

Stunningly put. The only inaccuracy is comparing the $1695.00 paid for estate sims to "$1000 mainland auctions". Those auctions rarely end for anything less than $1900.00. They have greater intial upfront cost, but of course mainland still has the lower $195.00 a month tier.

Darien, I don't know when you were born, but there isn't any inaccuracy in my comment.

You may not realize that the $1000-a-sim auctions existed for a very long time and essentially make up the bread-basket of Second Life, if you will.

In June 2005, the Lindens changed to this minimum bid auction of $1000 (more than a year later changed to $1250). It was floated as a leaked memo at one point and it's mere concept made the auction crash for a few days in 2005.

I called it "add-to-my-shopping-cart" instead of an auction.

What happened is that for months and months, well into 2006, the Lindens glutted the market with sims opening at $1000 -- and numerous sims were in fact sold for around that much, $1100 or $1005 or $1500 -- loads of them. Unfortunately, the Lindens never saw the importance of a title office and oldbies stopped monitoring this (I had to give up doing it manually) but if the records of the auctions could be summoned, it would tell this story.

Then what happened is that in November 2006, we had the island scandal, where it was discovered that tier was going to rise on islands and the remaining servers were going to be let go for $195 before the switch, and the insiders in the FIC were given a heads up.

When that was disclosed (by me on the Herald) the Lindens were forced to keep making $195 tier sims available until a fair deadline, November 30 or whatever it was, 14 days. So boatloads of $1250 islands for $195 were ordered and the Lindens had to eat that. It was probably their most painful FIC less ever -- lesson about why having a FIC is actually economically harmful at times -- but they bit back hard.

The didn't have the servers -- or didn't want to get the servers -- to start then meeting the need for mainland sales. Lots of people, including me, ordered the cheap islands who had never had any intention of getting islands but got them now. Whatever servers the Lindens could get their hands on, they had to put into serving those back orders, not offering as first land (they ended that program pronto in January 2007 I believe or soon after), and not as $1000-add-to-my-shopping-cart mainland sims.

Enter the era of the $2500 and even $3500 mainland sim that you're recalling and focusing on now.

So mainland went WAY up, which is one of those peculiar, non-intuitive economic virtualities of the SL reality that doesn't make sense. If there are more islands, and people suddenly buying islands who didn't intend to, then how come mainland would get in demand?

Well, part of the problem is the playing of chicken on the auction. Much the SL economy is explained, as always, by over-testiculated young macho males trying to outbid each other in a pissing match on the auction. They call it "getting market share". Anshe is often a part of this too (though she gave up at a certain island saturation level).

They buy mainland sims just because they're there, just to keep their name on the auction, just to make sure some other guy in the business doesn't buy it -- none of these reasons being valid business reasons, and all of them being psychological "reflexivity" sort of reasons.

So the Linden server shortage, not an economic actuality but a physical techncial one, and the land baron game of chicken, a psychological reality, combined to make higher prices. Combine the end of the first land program, and you have very steep prices, $12,000 or more for 512s, which is absurd, making the cost of starting Second Life $50 US for the subscription and the land, something you pay for World of Warcraft of Assassin's Creed or whatever, but not the game of SL.

So for a long time, land barons could enjoy this very skewed sellers' market, which of course could easily bite them in the ass any time as the Lindens could decide to glut -- and did -- at any time. So people could eternally be caught short.

At some point the Lindens really began to glut in earnest -- to make up their own bottom line (that's why it's always insect politics with them on the grid, they are at cross purposes with us).

Their purpose was not only to pick up sales, because island orders by that time, with everybody having gotten their $1250/195 sims and starting to choke on the $1695/295 sims. They needed to sell more sims, period, and mainland is great, you can do less work/programming/set-up, and get people to pay $3200 for one sim, instead of 2 island sims (to be sure, you only get $195 tier after that, but on the mainland, in fact Governor Linden, Estate Manager, can squeeze more like $400 out of sim if it sells off in parcels, as individual tier levels, not bulk tier levels.

The Lindens also wanted people coming in to have cheaper land. They can't get people on the tier needle every month if they have to pay so much for their first bag of smack. So they want them to have nickel bags.

Today, *we can't see* what sims are going for, have you noticed? It's been months that the memory and visibility of the final winning bid has been available. I asked Jack Linden why this was removed. He said it wasn't going to be permanently removed but was a feature that had to be added back in eventually. That strikes me as odd, given that all ebay technology has records of auctions and what the winning bid was, and this is ebay technology now being used (they changed over to this new software a few months ago).

The only way you can tell what a sim goes for now is by going inworld and trying to see what a land baron is putting it out for. And I do see the same pattern of land barons leaving sims out for US $1000 a quarter sim or whatever they can get.

While a sim is being bid on, you can see it's current bid:

Soye (79,160) Mature 38672m $1,121.00

so more than half is going for $1,121 and will likely not finish up at more than $1500, which lets you know the price of whole sims is going back down again.

For the market to continue as it had, we would have had to have grown by another factor of ten this year - from 10 million to 100 million residents, to maintain the 10-to-1 growth rate of last winter.

For every oldbie content creator, roughly 10 people entered the world and spent money last year. But for each 2007 creator, perhaps one new person entered the world spending money. If that. At this point, there is no other possibility besides competitive shakeout.

Taking a step into fantasy for illustrative purposes... had this been the real world, there would have been plenty of famines and wars accompanying such a pervasive global market correction. This was a very soft landing - unbelievably soft.

Personally, I think the Company is lucky that the world didn't *shrink* - servers going away as demand fell. Or perhaps it will, but not on the mainland.

There are other private estates showing deep signs of trouble - one look at the map is a good indication. I'm not talking about 'land for sale' - it's worse than that. I'm talking about land that was developed but has never, ever been used since last year's boom.

Personally I find this very alarming - implosion of a few key private estates would be a media nightmare, and thus an economic one too, for all of us.

I sense that not all is as it seems, regarding 'value' of estates. One does not 'prop up' the minimum bid of an auction from 1000 USD to 1250 USD unless... there was worry that the auctions would go for cheap. It's a real worry.

I've done a number of market tests by varying the rate of expansion with my own regions. It's almost a textbook-simple supply/demand situation.

But with one caveat: never have too much empty land available, or your value perception is destroyed. I didn't have to test that concept myself, a few other estates inadvertently tested it on their own, apparently trying to vacuum up as much marketshare as possible.

* * * * *

As bad as mainland is in many ways... it is largely healthy, as estates go.

Sixteen empty regions, or about 1 million square meters is hardly anything to worry about. The old Southern Mainland (a.k.a. Sansara on some maps) is something like 50 million square meters just by itself. I'd loosely estimate all of the mainland at something like 1/4 billion square meters - perhaps less than half a percent is available.

True, there is a desperate need to fix things like adfarm towers and so forth - long term ills. It's also a bad idea to sell SL's future by allowing land prices to skyrocket and drive users away when competition eventually comes.

But I think the reason that mainland reform is so slow in coming, is that right now the supply/demand equation is acting in the Company's favour. For now.

* * * * *

Overall, I'm a believer. I honestly think that someday we'll see 100 million users and 100,000 concurrent online on this platform (mostly humans, too).

I don't think an initial gold rush defines Second Life any more than it defined California.

Rather, I think we've struck... not gold, but copper and zinc, in the SL hills. In large quantities.

So it's not so glamourous, and not for the unskilled to simply pick up off the ground and get rich.

But it's still pretty damned useful, and will be good business for a long, long time.

Yes, i'm a bit young, having only joined SL in Oct of 2006. I was still quite the newbie around the time when they raised tier on private estates, so I've never experienced the days of $1000.00 mainland sims. I appreciate you taking the time to lay out the history. Very informative.

Well there is still some nice mainland out there, as you know. Carlisle and Liome, just to name two. Carlisle is one of those rare older sims where the neighbors, led by Random Unsung, have kept it looking exceptionally nice. And prices keep creeping up on the Mainland, albeit slowly. I don't think you can look at one half sim auction and say prices are going down.